Kate Bornstein

Katherine Vandam Bornstein is an American author, playwright, performance artist, actor, and gender theorist. As a transgender pioneer since the 1980s, Bornstein's reflections on sex and gender nonconformity have influenced various spheres of queer culture. She has stated "I don't call myself a woman, and I know I'm not a man". Bornstein now identifies as non-binary, and has also written personal accounts of having anorexia, surviving PTSD, and being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Bornstein grew up just outside of Asbury Park, New Jersey, in an upper middle-class Conservative Jewish family of Russian and Dutch descent. Bornstein studied Theater Arts with John Emigh and Jim Barnhill at Brown University (Class of '69). She then attended Brandeis for graduate school in acting, but left when she joined the Church of Scientology.

Bornstein joined the Church of Scientology in 1970. She found herself drawn to Scientology because thetans are genderless beings. However, she recounted that during her time in the church, Scientologists claimed they could "cure [her] of what they described as an unhealthy obsession with wanting to be a woman", and they embodied homophobia and transphobia. She also stated that she believed Scientology was a way she could help "save the world", a mission many hippies at the time pursued. Bornstein eventually would serve on a ship with L. Ron Hubbard and eventually become a high-ranking lieutenant in the Sea Org. While serving in this position, she secretly bought porn magazines from Lee Brewster. She would also purchase women's clothes to wear while staying in hotels and later discard them. Bornstein later became disillusioned and formally left the movement in 1982. By doing so, she was deemed a suppressive person, which prevented her from contacting her daughter.

Bornstein settled into the lesbian community in San Francisco, and wrote art reviews for the gay and lesbian paper The Bay Area Reporter. Over the next few years, she began to identify as neither a man nor a woman.

While living in Philadelphia in the early 1980s, Bornstein co-founded Order Before Midnight, then labeled a women's theater company. After moving to San Francisco, she worked with Theatre Rhinoceros and Outlaw Productions. At a conference on women and theater in 1988, she performed a trio of monologues exploring gender via roles she had performed throughout her career. In 1989, she joined her first San Francisco show, playing the Judge in The Balcony, produced by Theatre Rhinoceros.

In 1989, Bornstein created a theatre production in collaboration with Noreen Barnes, Hidden: A Gender, based on parallels between their own life and that of the intersex person Herculine Barbin. Bornstein studied Barbin's memoirs, which were edited by Michel Foucault, in shaping the play. She originally envisioned it as a single-person performance of multiple characters, but it expanded to include three roles, with Bornstein as Doc Grinder, a narrator and foil, Justin Vivian Bond playing Barbin, and Sydney Erskine playing Herman/Kate Amberstone. They first performed in San Francisco before performing at a festival in Seattle and going on tour.

In the 1990s, Bornstein wrote and starred in solo performances focused on gender and her own trans identity: The Opposite Sex Is Neither, and Virtually Yours. Her next two works remained focused on identity, as well as community and the concept of sanity. In 1998, she wrote Strangers in Paradox, whose subject was the medicalization of trans people that cast them as mentally ill and dangerous, a perspective that held for centuries in Western medicine. She and her partner Barbara Carrellas also developed Too Tall Blondes in Love, which then toured nationally during the 2000s. Other single-person performances Bornstein created include Hard Candy and y2kate: gender virus 2000, which involved monologues, slam poetry, and lecture.

Bornstein made her Broadway debut in July 2018 in the play Straight White Men. She has since created several performance pieces, some of them one-person shows.